Product description

Novel Gazing is the first collection of queer criticism on the history of the novel. The contributors navigate new territory in literary theory with essays that implicitly challenge the "hermeneutic of suspicion" widespread in current critical theory. In a stunning introductory essay, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick delineates the possibilities for a criticism that would be "reparative" rather than cynical or paranoid. The startingly imaginative essays in the volume explore new critical practices that can weave the pleasures and disorientations of reading into the fabric of queer analyses. Through discussions of a diverse array of British, French, and American novels - including major canonical novels, bestsellers, children's fiction, and science fiction - these essays explore queer worlds of taste, texture, joy, and ennui, focusing on such subjects as flogging, wizardry, exorcism, dance, Zionist desire, and Internet sexuality. Interpreting the works of authors as diverse as Benjamin Constant, Toni Morrison, T. H.
White, and William Gibson, along with canonical queer modernists such as James, Proust, Woolf, and Cather, contributors reveal the wealth of ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them. The dramatic reframing that these essays perform will make Novel Gazing essential for all literary critics. Contributors. Stephen Barber, Renu Bora, Anne Chandler, James Creech, Jonathan Goldberg, Joseph Litvak, Michael Lucey, Jeff Nunokawa, Cindy Patton, Jacob Press, Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Melissa Solomon, Tyler Stevens, Kathryn Bond Stockton, John Vincent, Maurice Wallace, and Barry Weller.

Author information

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center. Books she has authored include "Fat Art/Thin Art "and "Tendencies." She has edited or coedited numerous volumes, including "Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader" and "Gary In Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher," also published by Duke University Press.

Review quote

"This is brilliant... and it represents some brilliant critics at their best. These essays illustrate a different and immensely attractive discursive mode. I know of no work more resonant or anywhere near as generous. Beyond that, it marks Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's first move into reparative criticism - and that is a momentous event." James R. Kincaid, University of Southern California "The essays in this volume make clear that one can't read fiction anymore without queering it... Powerful and incisive... Sedgwick's own introductory essay is precisely about the restoration of relaxation to the strategies of queer literary and cultural criticism and of queer politics." [RR, PP] Mary Ann O'Farrell, Texas A & M University

Back cover copy

"This is brilliant. . . and it represents some brilliant critics at their best. These essays illustrate a different and immensely attractive discursive mode. I know of no work more resonant or anywhere near as generous. Beyond that, it marks Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's first move into reparative criticism--and that is a momentous event. "--James R. Kincaid, University of Southern California